Who should be worried about Tuni… Egypt?

Thomas P.M. Barnett is one of the most original thinkers on foreign policy around. His best-known work is “The Pentagon’s New Map,” which became a must-read book for policy-makers and military strategists when it came out in 2004.

The great fault line in international relations is not along religious or cultural divides. Rather, it is between a functioning core of nations and what Barnett calls the “non-integrated gap,” between nations connected to the modern age of knowledge, wealth and progress and those disconnected from it.

Seven years later, that’s still a pretty accurate map.

Barnett, among other things, now writes a blog for Esquire magazine. On Jan. 18, three days after Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled his country following weeks of protest, he wrote a very prescient entry – “Who Should Worry about the Tunisia Fallout, Really?”

About the same time, plenty of smart people were saying there would be no fallout from Tunisia. An Associated Press analysis said “chances appear far less likely of a rapid domino-style political housecleaning” in Egypt or Jordan. Robert Kaplan, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and a correspondent for The Atlantic, penned an op-ed for the New York Times, “One Small Revolution,” in which he wrote “there are plenty of reasons to think we are not on the cusp of a democratic avalanche.”

Back to Barnett. Here, a week before the protests began in Egypt, is one of the six nations or groups of nations he said should worry about Tunisia:

Egypt’s modern “pharaoh” should worry. Last time I was in Egypt, I heard the same lament from every young man I came across: “I can’t get married because I can’t get a job!” You want to brew a revolution? There’s no faster way than keeping young men from getting their just desserts, if you know what I mean. Put them off long enough, and some will resort to a strap-on — you know, the kind that allegedly wins you 72 virgins in the afterlife. And president pharoah Hosni Mubarak’s latest offer to his public is… 8-percent economic growth for the foreseeable future. Now that’s downright China-like, if he can keep his promises — and fast.

The other five who should be worried: Any regime with a youth bulge, which is most of the Arab world; the European Union; China; Algeria; and “any government keeping the masses happy with food subsidies.”